Competitive item restrictions

Within some competitive leagues, competitive item restrictions during matches are employed to ensure balanced gameplay. If players do attempt to use a restricted item, it is replaced with the stock item for that slot.

If new weapons are released in midst of a competition season, they will typically become restricted from play unless given approval by the league's administrators and team leaders. No items are restricted in Valve Competitive Matchmaking.

Item Whitelist

The item whitelist is a simple text file, item_whitelist.txt by default, with a simple binary switch after each value to determine whether it is enabled or not.

Weapon bans during a match are usually enforced by the use of an item whitelist (although some leagues use an honor system instead of a whitelist).

To enable a whitelist, simply define its name and location using the mp_tournament_whitelist command.

Example: mp_tournament_whitelist "cfg/item_whitelist.txt"

In order to restrict a weapon from being played, simply set the value to "0" next to the weapon's name.

Example: "The Shortstop" "0"

The same goes for allowing a weapon to be used, changing the value to "1" instead.

Example: "The Shortstop" "1"

One also has the ability to enable or disable all unlisted items on a whitelist by using the following paramater:

"unlisted_items_default_to" "0" or "1"

Using this command, one can easily build a whitelist adding only items they want allowed or banned, depending on the above parameter's value.

To obtain a full list of items that can be added to a whitelist, use the item_show_whitelistable_definitions command in the server console.
sv_cheats "1" must be set on the server in order to use this command.